Authors of documents and forms that include a substantial amount of standard text can now use computers to generate forms and assemble documents. Form generation software automates data entry tasks by prompting a user for data, inserting those data in their proper place in a form, and then printing a completed version of the form or inserting an electronic version of the completed form in a word processing document. Existing document assembly systems typically lead a user through a series of questions, generate a document made up of text selected based on the responses to the questions, and then print the assembled documents or allow them to be exported to a word processor.
Automated document assembly appears to be particularly advantageous for attorneys and other individuals who prepare long legal or transactional documents. Using computers to assemble documents reduces the amount of time that these individuals spend on the mechanics of document preparation. But document assembly systems are not universally used, and current software does not provide an optimal solution to the problem of multiple users generating, updating, and maintaining a number of different, but overlapping, documents.